Land managers have long identified a critical need for a practical
and effective framework for designing restoration strategies,
especially where invasive plants dominate. A holistic, ecologically
based, invasive plant management (EBIPM) framework that integrates
ecosystem health assessment, knowledge of ecological processes,
and adaptive management into a successional management model
has recently been proposed. However, well-defined principles
that link ecological processes that need to be repaired to tools
and strategies available to managers have been slow to emerge,
thus greatly limiting the ability of managers to easily apply
EBIPM across a range of restoration scenarios. The broad objective
of this article is to synthesize current knowledge of the mechanisms
and processes that drive plant community succession into ecological
principles for EBIPM. Using the core concepts of successional
management that identify site availability, species availability,
and species performance as three general drivers of plant community
change, we detail key principles that link management tools used
in EBIPM to the ecological processes predicted to influence the
three general causes of succession. Although we acknowledge that
identification of principles in ecology has greatly lagged behind
other fields and recognize that identification of ecological
principles and the conditions in which they hold are still being
developed, we demonstrate how current knowledge and future advances
can be used to structure a holistic EBIPM framework that can
be applied across a range of restoration scenarios.